Review ArticleEarly-Modern Japanese Confucianism: The Gyoza-Manju Controversy

Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, York University

Watanabe Hiroshi 3it.;J7 ;, 1.: • Kinsei Nihon shakai 12. Sogaku lb:..f!!;a.if ;t..i t. t. ~~ [Early-Modern Japanese Society and Sung

Learning] (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1985). viii,252 pp., index, ¥2800~

Among Japanese scholars of early-modern (kinsei~~ )Japanese thought, there are two underlying assumptions about thenature of Confucian ideas introduced to JaRan and their assi~~la;

tion, as represented by what I call the Gyoza -l)t.J- and ManJu a~~ Schools. l Adherents of the former school, such as Maruyama~sao ~ ~ Jl ~ , assume that Chinese ideographs representingConfucian ideas denoted more or less the same thing in bothpremodern China and Japan; after all, gyoza (fried dumplings) arevirtually identical to chiao-tzu i3t;;-. In speech, a JapaneseConfucian might pronounce key terms such as ~ ~ (the Way),chung i!. (loyalty), hsiao ~ (filial piety), and i-Ii t 1,1­(principle of righteousness) differently from his Ming or Ch'ingChinese counterparts, but the concepts and values signified didnot differ radically. Gyoza School adherents assume that theuniversalist commonalities in Confucianism are of more historicalimportance than the minor particularist differences that mightarise from its assimilation beyond China's borders.

By contrast, followers of the Manju School, such as TsudaSokichi ~ 'to ~ ~ ~ , hold that michi, chji , ko, and qiri(the Japanese correlates of the four Chinese terms mentioneda bove), and the like are Japanese terms. These may have derivedetymologically from Chinese, but the values and concepts theydesignated were peculiar to early-modern Japan, having beenshaped by a socio-political environment drastically differentfrom that of mid- to late-imperial China. No one biting into aJapan manju (a bun with bean-jam filling) would ever mistake itfor a Chinese man-t'ou (a kind of steamed bread), even thoughthey are written with the same ideographs.

Built on one or the other of these underlying assumptionsare two major scholarly theses about the ideological role playedby Confucianism, especially the Chu Hsi ~ ~ variety, in Japanduring the early-modern period. One thesis"holds Confucianism tohave been offically sponsored in the early seventeenth century as 'an "orthodoxy" supporting the existing order and Tokugawa bakufusupremacy. The other thesis sees Confucianism to have been analien teaching and value system unsuited to, if not incompatiblewith, the realities of Japanese society. According to this

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second thesis, Confucianism was at most a personal moral creed oran academic pursuit for private scholars, who rarely held govern­ment posts and so could not implement whatever Confucian idealsthey might have held.

The key questions for this field as posed in Japanese schol­arly circles, then, are: How compatible was Chinese Confucianism,an alien doctrine, to Japanese socio-political realities in theearly-modern period? Could and did the Tokugawa bakufu employConfucianism, and especially Chu Hsi Learning, as a ruling ideol­ogy? And, how far did that form of Confucianism produced inJapan diverge from its prototype in mid- to late-imperial China?Of course, these questions depend on how-far one stretches thenotion of compatibility, on one's definitions of "orthodoxy" and"ideology," and on the amount of Japanese variation or deviancefrom Chinese prototypes one will tolerate before Japanese Con­fucianism ceases to be "truly Confucian." But, disregarding suchadmittedly important considerations, I believe the basic typologyjust presented helps us sort out and clarify some key historicaland historiographical issues addressed by a selected group ofpostwar Japanese intellectual historians. It is hoped that thefollowing review, while not exhaustive, will serve to surveytrends among Japanese scholars of early-modern thought.

Watanabe Hiroshi is a specialist in East Asian politicalthought, still in his early forties, on the Faculty of Law atTokyo University. (Law faculties at Japanese universities in­clude what we call political science). His qistinguished academ­ic career includes a research stint at Harvard University from1980 to 1982, where he put his formidable linguistic skills togood use. Contact with intellectual historians of China whoreside in the West, such as Benjamin Schwartz and Tu Wei-mingif±" .!1~ ~ , no doubt enriched his study of early-modern Japanesethought in a comparative East Asian context. Watanabe has givenus a provocative book, indispensible for all working in Japaneseor Sino-Japanese intellectual history. The work comprises twoparts: his main trea~ise in three chapters entitled (in transla- ~

tion) "One Condition for the History of Confucianism in the FirstHalf of the Tokugawa Period," and a Supplementary Essay on ItSJinsai 1fAi 1:' t and ItS TSgai {rJi ~;.£ . Both parts werepreviously pUbl~shed as articles and appear here with very slightrevision under the more sweeping title, Kinsei Nihon shakai toSSgaku [Early-Modern Japanese Society and Sung Learning).2 --

Watanabe succeeded to the law post at Tokyo Universityf;>rmerly held by Maruyama Masao and Matsumoto Sannosuke ;fil;\.;4: :=...1... NJ , and deference to them no doubt explains his gentle andindirect refutation of Maruyama's classic thesis, which datesfrom the early 1940s. 3 The political scientist Maruyama heldthat: the Chu Hsi (or Sung) Learning of Fujiwara Seika ~lf, t!~

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and Hayashi Razan ~~ J,.f was identical to Sung Learning inimperial China; it enjoyed a position of philosophical dominanceat the very start of the Tokugawa period; it served the Tokugawabakufu as a ruling ideology capable of inducing popular submis­sion to the existing society as part of a "medieval naturalorder"; and its breakdown due to attacks by the1\i.more "modern"Ancient Learning School of Ogyii Sorai~ !. te.. ~/r constitutesthe main theme in early-modern Japanese intellectual history.

Watanabe also rejects the influential thesis produced byTsuda Sekichi, the premier Sino-Japanologist from Waseda Univer­sity, whose distinguished career spanned both the prewar andpostwar eras. Tsuda's work in this area, published between 1916and 1921, considered early-modern thought in Japan to be "thethought of commoners," which succeeded the earlier Nara-Heian"thought of aristocrats" and the Kamakura-Muromachi "thought ofwarriors. ,,4 According to Tsuda, Confucianism and its Chinesecultural trappings were alien and irrelevant to "life as peopleactually lived it" in Japan. Concepts that best reveal trueJapanese values and sentiments, such as giri or iji ~•.:tl!. ,cannot be properly conveyed through Chinese ideographs. There­fore, the only historically or culturally meaningful form ofJapanese thought in any period was manifested in vernacularliterature, not in the classical Chinese writings of Heian dia­rists, medieval Zen monks, or Tokugawa Confucian scholars, whowere cut off from everyday life. Tsuda, then, was the mostextreme Manju School exponent, who virtually denied any place forConfucianism in the study of early-modern Japanese thought.

Watanabe is closer to, and should perhaps be seen as refin­ing and expanding on, the work of two postwar historians: BiteMasahide~. jE.~ , formerly of Nagoya and Tokyo Universi­ties, and Tahara Tsuguo ~ ~ ~il fP of Hokkaide University. Bite'swork was first published durin~ the latter half of the 1950s, andTahara's dates from 1966-1967. It should be noted that Tsuda,Bite, and Tahara belonged to faculties of arts and/or departmentsof Japanese history (kokushi ~ '#L ), not faculties of law • Biteand Tahara held that Chu Hsi's Sung Learning was unsuited tosocio-political realities in the first century of Tokugawa rulewhen it was imported, and so it could not be adapted to functionas a political ideology early in that era. According to Bite,trying to adhere to Sung Learning forced Hayashi Razan to confinehimself to the realm of pure scholarship, and trying to remainfaithful to the spirit o{ co. nfucianism drove Nakae Teju 1;,!.~~ and Kumazawa Banzan p!;t.- i J,.f into hermitage or exile. Onthe other hand, remaining faithful to the Tokugawa socio-politi­cal order forced men like Yamazaki Ansai dt df~ r~, ~ to do vio­lence to Chi Hsi Learning. Bito and Tahara were two of theearliest to raise the controversial issue of Confucianism's"suitability" to or "compatibility" with (tekigesei i!! ~ 4:1.. )

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Japanese society--how this was lacking early in the Edo period,and how it had to be developed later on if Confucianism were tosurvive and prosper.

Bit6 and Tahara, however, limited themselves to analyzingthe writings of three or four "great thinkers" of the earlyTokugawa period. Watanabe goes far beyond that. Though herejects the labeling of his methodology as belonging to "socialhistory," Watanabe's analysis undeniably centers on a comparativeanalysis of Japanese and Chinese society and of social roles andvalues in those two countries. He demonstrates vividly and indetail how early-modern, as opposed to a narrower Tokugawa,periodization is crucial. Watanabe forcefully argues that theSengoku itt~ 11J samur_ai ethos and the value system of earlyTokugawa Japanese commoners were hostile to Confucian teachingsand that this precluded any simple co-optation of Confucianism asa ruling orthodoxy or ideology. Thus r Watanabe treats roughlythe first century of Tokugawa Confucianism as a historicalcontinuation of Sengoku ideas and values, not as a historicalstarting point in itself, as Maruyama did; thus, Sung Learningwas not a thesis for Sorai's antithesis to break down. Perhapsthe most important part of Watanabe's argument (and the leastwell substantiated) is that, though Confucianism and Chu HsiLearning began as alien doctrines, they became integral toJapan's early-modern culture and value system by the mid­eighteenth century, and so helped reshape Japanese society.

Through an exhaustively documented comparison of society inearly-modern Japan and imperial China, Watanabe serves up hisdelectable manju in Chapters 1 and 2 of Part I. For example,despite superficial similarities, the Japanese hoken t-=f ~ systemwas not identical to the feng-chien ~ 11. order idealized in Choutimes, and the Confucian shi-no-ko-sho (in Chinese, shih-nung­kung-shang :t: t .!- ~ ) status hierarchy had no basis inJapanese reality. Japan's early-modern daimyo and samurai, nomatter what they might have fancied themselves, were not the shihof imperial China who dispensed "virtuous government." Tokuga;a­shoguns, unmistakably "kings" by Confucian criteria, never estab­lished the Confucian dynastic "rituals" essential to administra­tion. "Loyalty and filial piety" differed in Japan, because theruler-subject and parent-child relationships inhered in differentpolitical and family systems. Japanese samurai performed socialroles that Chinese Confucians would have despised as fit for "badiron" soldiers or eunuchs. The family members of Japanese Con­fucian scholars routinely violated Chinese Confucian taboos onmarriage and adoption. And, above all, what self-respecting manof the sword would allow himself to be seen crying at funeralsjust because that was stipulated by the Book of Rites?

Having established that Chu Hsi Learning could not serve asan orthodoxy in seventeenth-century Japan, Watanabe outlines his

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three-stage developmental scheme for Confucianism in general anddescribes the significance of that learning during the early­modern period. Stage I is the pre-Jinsai age of transmission,adaptation, and digestion of Chu Hsi Learning from 1600-1684.Stage II is the age of Jinsai, Sorai, and the Sekimon shingaku¢ ~~ IU11t of Ishida Baigan ~ ~ ~~ , from 1688 to 1747. ForWatanabe, this represents the highpo~nt of Japanese Confucianthought. Stage III is the developmental age from 1748-1751onward; it was characterized by eclecticism and schools influ­enced by Sorai but not necessarily Confucian, including thinkersas diverse as the Nativists (kokugakusha ~ ~~ ), bellet­rists, and Rangaku ~ ~ (Dutch Learning) political economists.

Although there were far more Confucian thinkers in thesecond half of the early-modern period, Watanabe argues that mostof those known to us tOday as "great" or "original" lived in thefirst half; and that era corresponds to Stages I and II of hisperiodization scheme. Watanabe explains this early burst ofintellectual creativity as arising from the stress and tensionexperienced by Confucians struggling to overcome inconsistenciesand contradictions in life. On a personal level, they had tocope with being both samurai and Confucian; and in politics andsociety, they had to compromise their foreign ideals to indige­nous realities. This was especially true in Stage I, beforeJinsai and Sorai, when Japanese intellectuals made Chu Hsi Confu­cianism palatable to their countrymen by consciously altering andadapting Sung Learning to fit the needs of their society.

That quest found culmination in Stage II, with the appear­ance of Japan1s Ancient Learning School led by Ito Jinsai andOgyG Sorai, who systematically rejected Sung Learning as incor­rect and created forms of Confucianism suitable to early-modernJapanese society. As outlined in the Supplementary Essay in thisvolume, for Watanabe, Ito Jinsai1s life history personifies howConfucianism was naturalized in Japan. Jinsai began as a Chu Hsifollower and became a recluse for eight years, trying to adhereto those alien teachings; but then he abandoned Chu Hsi, formu­lated his own thought, and returned to his family and society.For Jinsai, the Way of the Confucian sages was not somethingdifficult and foreign; it was "plain and familiar" or accessiblein everyday Japanese life. The Confucian "Principle of Heaven"accorded with jott ' "human tenderness and com~assion." AsWatanabe holds, that was precisely the naSake~~ and ninjo ~t# that pervaded Kyoto-asaka merchant society; and, I would add,was depicted in Genroku ~~~ literature as Tsuda claimed. But,Jinsai1s manju-style interpretation of i§ contradicted Chu Hsi1sview of ch1ing+k as emotion leading men to stray from the Way.

By the same token, Sorai naturalized Confucianism by politi­cizing it to fit what he saw as the needs of Edo bakufu rule.From about 1680 onward, Tokugawa shoguns such as Tsunayoshi ~~~

~fflc

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became somewhat receptive to Confucian ideas. But, that recep­tivity was limited to listening to what scholar-advisors such asArai Hakuseki ~~ ~ ~ ~ preached, not putting it into politi­cal practice. According to Watanabe, Sorai reinterpreted theChinese Confucian classics with the aim of convincing bakufuleaders that Confucianism really was essential to rulership. Forexample, his rigorous philological methods led him to argue thatthat unless Japan's shogun-king created proper dynastic rituals-­an act which defined the Way for Sorai--peace and prosperitycould not be maintained in the realm. So, in sum, Sorai madeConfucianism suitable for early-modern Japan in the realm ofpolitical theory, just as Jinsai had in that of personal morality.

Watanabe attempts to reinterpret early-modern Japanese Con­fucianism in a provocatively original way; and he succeeds admir­ably in many respects, for the book is extremely informative andvaluable. Indeed, the insights that Watanabe provides onthought, politics, and society in imperial China alone make thisbook worth reading. Jhe breadth and depth of Watanabe's erudi­tion and his command of Japanese and Chinese sources astound evenhis most vituperative critics. 6 But still, Kinsei Nihon shakaito Sogaku is not without problems. I will begin by noting spe­cific points in Watanabe's argument that seem questionable.Then, I will deal with the book's larger issues in the context ofpostwar Japanese secondary scholarship on early-modern thought.

First, I would debate Watanabe's rejection of Confucianismin general, as opposed to Chu Hsi's Sung Learning in particular,as unsuited to serve as a doctrine supporting the bakuhan ~ >~system. Granted, only a small number of late Sengoku and ear~yTokugawa Japanese could even read classical Chinese, much lessmaster the intricacies of Chu Hsi thought. Daimyo and samuraimet it with derision, and commoners could scarcely tell it apartfrom Christianity. Granted also that the status hierarchy inJapan was fluid" not fixed, in the late sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries; hence, it did not correspond to someidealized version of the Chou era's shi-no-ko-sho ranking system.To his credit, Watanabe has demonstrated all of this conclusivelyand graphically, using concrete examples culled from a plethoraof rarly cited primary sources. But, as his critics have noted,to demand an accurate grasp of Chu Hsi thought among earlyTokugawa thinkers is asking too much. I believe it is best todistinguish Confucianistic ideas and values, as these evolved inJapan, from Confucian ideas and values as practiced in theChinese homeland. 7 Clearly, some Confucianistic ideas and valuesdid coincide, accidentally or not, with certain administrativeaims of early bakufu rulers: to organize society on a stricthierarchy, to prize mental over physical labor as a moral basisfor determining that hierarchy, and to rely on agriculture more

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than commerce for government revenues. As Watanabe himselfpoints out, there was in fact a discriminatory early-modernJapanese status hierarchy that placed outcasts, peasants, andtownspeople (in ascending order) below the samurai, daimyo, andcourt nobility above. Furthermore, the more common trend ofmonetary and taxation systems in early-modern world history hasbeen to advance from payment-in-kind to payment-in-cash. But,the early Edo bakufu intentionally ignored the kandaka ~ ~ Sy5-

I"

tern of money-use, quite widespread i n central and western Japan,in favor of the seemingly more reactionary kokudaka ¢~system of rice-use.

Thus, the key point about early-modern Japan's assimilation~nd.political utilization of Confucian values, as Kinugasa Yasukii(l(... ~ rl::t.1 holds, is that thinkers 1ike Kaibara Ekken- ..,. ..had to fix the- moral status hierarchy along hereditary lines anddevise a version of Confucianism that conformed to the economicprinciples on which the bakuhan state based itself. 8 And, asMi yake Masahiko ~~~~ holds, much in Chu Hsi Learning waslogically compatible with the ideological aims of bakufu rule-­though i t was not necessarily "suitable," and I certainly rejecthis assertion that the bakufu 's adoption of Confucianism as apolitical orthodoxy was "inevitable."9 How far the bakufu spon­sored Confucianism is debatable, but it certainly did not sup­press Confucianism as it did Christianity or Fuju fuse ~~~~BUddhism; and this can be interpreted as contra-factual evidenceindicating a degree of official favor. Confucian thinkers eager­ly joined Buddhists in other sects, ,who~ sponsored throughthe temple-registration system, in attacking the wicked cult ofChristianity as inimical to the early-modern Japanese state andsociety.

A second specific point I find questionable is Watanabe'sstress on Japan's particular ie j[ system as precluding the easyassimilation of Confucian family morality. Above all, Chinesefilial piety (hsiao) called for preserving the extended-familybloodline through male offspring. But, in early-modern Japan,keeping the family bloodline intact was far less important thanmaking the family's inherited occupation prosper. This was theessence ofka (filial piety) in Japan. Heads of Japanese house­holds adopted males having no blood ties as husbands for theirdaughters and named them heirs on condition that, if need be,they abandon their real parents for the good of the adoptive house.

This observation on the manju-style difference between hsiaoand ka, though undeniably true at one level of generalization, issomewhat oversimplified and therefore misleading. For example,it overlooks the prevalent prewar Japanese sentiment that becom­ing an adopted son was undesirable, something a man would notnormally do except at the prompting of his own parents and forreasons calculated ultimately to benefit the house into which he

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had been born. l O Early-modern Japanese were not quite so ready,as Watanabe implies, to slight blood ties. Indeed, many adoptedsons (yoshi 1l~ ) were nephews adopted by uncles, not by theproverbia I "tota I strangers" (aka !!Q. tanin ilt.. t1) 1~ J...- ). Indeed,it is not too exaggerated to say that, for a man to become anadopted son was something akin to a daughter being sold to abrothel. Again, the general Confucianistic ideal of filial pie­ty, or "filial submission" as Frederick Mote translates the term,was the same in both China and Japan: lauding children who agreedto sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of parents andfamily, though the nature of "family" did differ in Japan. Also,Watanabe could have strengthened his argument by citing theparticularistic Japanese form of filial piety often noted byJapanese folklore (minzokugaku 6l1~~ ) specialists such asYanagida Kunio #? tf1 ~ ~ : that filial piety in Japan meantobserving Buddhist memorial services for the dead, a form ofancestor worship. Finally, Watanabe does not satisfactorilyexplain the fanatical emphasis that early-modern Japanese placedon the nation's imperial line, supposedly unbroken since Amaterasu12- t1f (the Sun Goddess). Thinkers in virtually all schoolsgloated over this "fact" that putatively demonstrated Japan'suniqueness and superiority in the world.

Third, vexing ambiguities arise over Watanabe's use of theterm "Sung Learning" itself. Does he intend it to mean "Chu HsiLearning" exclusively, or more broadly as "all Confucian schoolsthat emerged from the SQng period onward?" Even in China, SungLearning in this latter sense appeared in radically differentforms as dictated by changing socio-political conditions.Watanabe is correct to assert that the Chinese civil serviceexamination system encouraged egali~arianism and moderated thegeneral Confucian emphasis on social hierarchy and rule by mentallaborers, as noted above. So, in that sense, early-modern Confu­cianistic ideas and values did differ significantly from ChuHsi's brand of Sung Learning in imperial China. But, it is"alsotrue that in both the Sung and late Ch'ing eras, known for theirstrident Chinese culturalism, central governments relied more oncommercial taxes than land taxes for revenue; and leaders ration­alized this policy based on ideas ~ound in the "Debates on Saltand Iron" of the Han dynasty or in writings from the Sung era.Did that make those Chinese dynasties somehow less "Confucian?"

This last point , leads to an examination of larger issuesencompassing the book a s a whole. My first comment on this scoreconcerns not only Watanabe, but all Japanese scholars of early­modern thought who work within the gyoza-manju typology.ll Howfar did Confucianism have to be altered to become "suitable," andwas the end product no longer really "Confucian?" As we haveseen, the Gyoza School emphasizes universalist commonalities in

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China and Japan. Maruyama's classic work even attempted to placeearly-modern Japanese thought in a global historical framework:the transition from a "medieval" identification of the socio­political order with the natural order, to a "modern" view ofstate and society as man-made. His analysis also extends to theend of the Tokugawa period. These points hold as well for themore recent work of Kinugasa and Miyake, cited above, thoughperhaps to a lesser extent. By contrast, the Manju School 'sparticularist "unsuitability" thesis--though its academic respect­ability is beyond doubt~-seems to contain traces of a more vulgarNihonjin E2!l ~;:$ J......~ ; and it tends to limit itself to thefirst half of the Tokugawa period. The Manju School is without adoubt something legitimate and highly valuable, which has grownout of the Nativist kokugaku, kokushi, and minzokugaku scholarlytraditions in Japan. It rightly warns us against the danger ofdrawing abstract and over-generalized comparisons with China andthe West that ignore the concrete realities of Japanese life; andit can be applied as a corrective to doctrines as diverse asMarxism, modernization theory, and the "same culture, same race"ideology of prewar Japanese expansionism.

However, those of us ·who live outside of Japanese academe orwork in non-Japanese fields cannot help being puzzled by thetenacity and pervasiveness of this gyoza-manju controversy incontemporary Japanese scholarship. Would, say, a British histo­rian assert that the Anglican Church was not really "Christian"because it was overly compromised to English socio-politicalrealities? Chinese medievalists do argue that Buddhism was aliento China and had to be sinified to gain acceptance, but that isnot so dominant and recurring a theme in Chinese intellectualhistory. We Westerners would profit greatly by assiduously fol­lowing issues and trends in Japanese secondary scholarship, andwe have long been inexcusably delinquent about this. Yet, by thesame token, our Japanese colleagues in the field today find theirown research at a bottleneck that stems partly from an excessive(and parochial) concern with "suitability." A bit of "interna­tionalization," as the current catchphrase goes, might help gen­erate fresh new insights.

Watanabe has striven mightily to provide these insightsthrough a comparative-contrastive approach, concluding both thatConfucianism was alien to begin with and that it became integralto Japanese culture. But, the predominant thrust of his argumentends up emphasizing the first conclusion; roughly 180 pages(Chapters 1 and 2) in a 252-page book are devoted to it. Such animbalance may cause the casual, or unkind, reader to overlook thesecond half of Watanabe's argument. Unfortunately, his use ofthe expression "Early-Modern Japanese Society" in the book'stitle does much to contribute to this misunderstanding. Japanesehistorical periodization conventionally lists "early-modern"

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(kinsei) as from 1568 to either 1853 or 1867. That leads thereader to expect extensive coverage of the second half of the Edoperiod, as Kinugasa Yasuki's Kinsei Jugaku shisa shi no kenkyudoes in its three-stage periodization of Confucian thought.Watanabe's unsuitability thesis is questionably valid when ap­plied to the era 1568.to 1600, or even down to 1680 when contem­poraries finally began to realize that theirs was an era of peacerather than war. But, we are told virtually nothing about StageIII, from 1748-1751 onward, except that it was characterized byeclecticism and schools bf thought influenced by Sorai but notnecessarily Confucian. In fairness to Watanabe i he does addressthese post-1750 issues in other published work. 2 Nonetheless,when considered as an independent monograph, Kinsei Nihon shakaito Sagaku does not deliver what its title promises. This charac­teristic appears to be common to all the postwar Manju scholarsreviewed here, except for Tsuda. Tahara Tsuguo, for example,claims to present "Studies in Tokugawa Intellectual History," buthe never gets beyond Jinsai and Sorai; and the same general pointcan be made about Bita Masahide, who purports to cover Japan'sentire "feudal" period. 13

Specifically, then, what issues should Watanabe have raisedand answered in Part III? The first concerns Ito Jinsai, whorepresents the highpoint in early-modern Japanese Confucianismfor Watanabe. He argues that Jinsai succeeded in naturalizingConfucianism by making it "plain and familiar" or accessible tothe merchant class, and by interpreting key Confucian terms in amanner consistent with ninja or the kind of "human tenderness andcompassion" that mayor may not be unique to the Japanese. Yet,Watanabe also tells us that Ishida Baigan and Sekimon shingakuarrived at a similar naturalization of Confucian ideas and valuesand did so in colloquial Japanese. That presumably would havebeen even more "plain and familiar" to the Tokugawa merchantclass, or at least to most sectors of it. A curious questionthen arises: Why should early-modern Japanese commoners orsamurai want to spend years studying an archaic foreign languageto get largely the same message available in native form? Wouldthey not conclude, as Tsuda contends, that Confucianism wassuperfluous to their daily lives and needs, especially as the Edoperiod progressed? Quite to the contrary, Confucianism gained inpopularity among all social classes during the second half of theperiod and became more and more identified with a burgeoningJapanese nationalism. Witness Yoshida Shain ~ ~ ;p~ ~ , whoselegendary Japanese spirit was best manifested in his 1855 prisoncommentaries on the Mencius. How is this seeming ~-fusion ofConfucianism with Nativism in the late Tokugawa period to beexplained? As well, a detailed discussion of Yoshida Shain'sthought would certainly have strengthened Watanabe's argumentthat Sung Learning became integral to early-modern Japan's cul-

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ture and value system.The second and related question I raise here has to do with

the political implications of Ogyu Sorai's emphasis on bakufudynastic rule. According to Watanabe, Sorai made Confucianismpolitically suitable to Japan by reinterpreting the Chinese clas­sics so as to convince bakufu leaders that Confucian ritual wasabsolutely needed to maintain domestic stability and well-being.Watanabe relates too that shoguns from Yoshimune ~ ~ onwardnever heeded this advice, and yet Japan was none the worse forit; the nation paradoxically remained at peace and became seem­ingly more prosperous. So again, why did Confucianism grow instrength and popularity when, as Sorai's students lamented, itand they had proven to be useless in government? Watanabe alsotells us--~nd I find this suggestion fascinating--that thebakufu's rejection of Confucian ritual in its own administrationlater helped direct the people's minds to imperial court ritualand so encouraged reverence for the throne. Details are lacking,however.

Other controversial historical issues go unmentioned aswell. For example, what political implications did the Kansei1L~ ban on Heterodox Learning have? We find no discussion ofnow, or whether, Western Learning and Confucian political economyhelped strengthen the status quo and bakufu supremacy from thelate eighteenth century onward. What implications did Confucian­ism have for facilitating, or impeding, the assimilation ofadvanced technology and socio-political forms of organizationfrom the West between 1853 and l868?

In sum, Kinsei Nihon shakai to Soqaku does not deal withthree important post-1750 problems: (1) the key role of Kokugakuand Shinto in bolstering the prestige and increasing the popular­ity of Confucianism among all social strata; (2) the ideologicaland political uses to which the Edo bakufu put all Stage IIIschools of thought, those influenced by Sorai even if not Confu­cian; and (3) the legacy that early-modern Japanese Confucian­istic thought bequeathed to later eras. As mentioned earlier,Watanabe does deal with these issues in other published pieces;and therefore we can look forward eagerly to their revision andrepublication as monographs or volumes of collected essays.14

For the most part, Chinese, Japanese, and Western academicsstill live in separate worlds, even when they work in the samerelatively narrow field or discipline. The intrinsic difficultyof classical' Chinese and classical Japanese primary sources, theneed to acquaint oneself with Western critical methods, and theburgeoning amount of secondary scholarship produced in Japanese,in Chinese, and in Western languages all make the effort toachieve scholarly communication across national lines more andmore difficult today. So, it is truly heartening to see a young

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scholar such as Watanabe equally at home and functioning in allthree academic worlds. His presence promises to raise the leveland increase the scope of research in Japanese and comparativeEast Asian thought. Let us hope that his works will appear inEnglish and Chinese translations, so that non-Japanese readerswill have ready access to his seminal ~ritings.

Notes

1. As will become apparent, the contours of the kinsei orearly~modern period (1568 to 1853 or 1868) are of decisive impor­tance for this discussion. That is why I have tried to avoidusing the more familiar and convenient term "Tokugawa Confucianism."

, 2. Part One, "Tokugawa zenki Jugaku shi no ichi jaken" f~J'f~ ~ 1t~ 1-C1) - ~. 1t.:t- [One condition for the history ofConfucianism in the first half of the Tokugawa period], waspUblished in Kokka gakkai zasshi ~ 1l~~ ff!. ~;;" 94: 1-2(February 1981) and 96:7-8 (August 19831; Part Two, "Ito Jinsai,Togai" was published in Sagara Toru if! 8c- j:... , et al., ed., Edoas shisokatachi 12 Jr.:!- f f1) ~ 11 it 1= -If ..J:,.. [Thinkers of the EdoPeriod, I] (Tokyo: Kenbun shuppan, 1981). I wish to express myappreciation to Watanabe for personal correspondence on severaloccasions, which has done much to clarify my understanding of hisideas. He also has generously sent me copies of all his pub-lished work, enlightened me about numerous primary sources, andreferred me to the relevant publications of other Japanese scholars.

3. Nihon seij i shiso shi kenkyu a~ ~:3~.·;dl..t!. t 4if'~[Studies in the History of Japanese Political Thought] (Tokyo:Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1952). However, the essays that com­prise this book first appeared in the early 1940s. Mikiso Hanehas performed the valuable service of translating Maruyama'sclassic into English under the title Studies in the IntellectualHistory of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press,1974). Note that Maruyama, in the "Author's Introduction" tothis translation, has modified many of his earlier views.

4. See Tsuda Sokichi, Bungaku ni arawaretaru waga kokuminshisa !!2 kenkyu f..~ r: ~L ~ h 1t ~~,;." ~ ~ jt ~. ~~;f ~ .[Studies in Japanese National Thought as Expressed in Literature](Tokyo: Iwanami bunko reprint ed., 1977-1978), 8 vols.

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5. Bi to Masahide, Mihon hoken shiso shi kenkyu Ia ~ ~1 ~~ 1J.. ~~It ~ [Studies in the History of Japanese FeudalThought] (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1961). The essays in this bookwere pUblished independently from 1956 to 1959. Tahara Tsuguo,Tokugawa shiso shi kenkyu ~~. 11/ I~ ~l ;!.:aJt~ [Studies in theHistory of Tokugawa Thought] (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1967).

6. See the review by Hongo Takamori '$ ;e:p~~ , of MiyagiKyoiku University, in Shigaku zasshi t\~~ ti'&. 96: 4 (April1987), p. 78. One notes that the capacity for venom in our fieldis not limited to this side of the Pacific.

7. Here the once-vener.ated distinction in ancient historybetween "Hellenic" (real Greek) and "Hellenistic" ("Greekish" asadapted by non-Greek) civilization is instructive.

__ 8. Kinugawa Yasuki, Kinsei Jugaku shisoshi n£ kenkyu~~1~~/~~.1!-"tiJf~ [Studies in the History of Early-ModernConfuc~an Thought] (Tokyo: Hosei daigaku shuppankyoku, 1976).Again, Kinugasa·s book is composed of essays previously pub­lished, in this case between 1959 and 1965. However, Kinugasahas added new material and considerably revised portions of thebook that had come out before.

9. Miyake Masahiko, "Edo jidai no shiso" >1-' ~~1~\ 0)~f!.[Thought in the Edo .pe r i Od ] , Ln Ishida Ishiro :n. r:8 - .Jtp , ed.,Taikei Mihon shi sosho 23: Shiso shi II ;( ~ a;<f~ ~~ 23:~.~. ~ II [Compendium of Works on Japanese History, Vol. 23:History of Thought, Vol. II] (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppan, 1976).

10. This sentiment remained prevalent until postwar legalreforms and changing mores altered the traditional family syste~.

11. I say "Japanese scholars" because Tokugawa specialists inthe West generally ignore this typology in favor of analyzingearly Tokugawa Confucianism as "ideology," and they usually applytheories from literary criticism, semiotics, or structural andsymbolic anthropology. See the prime example of Herman Ooms,Tokugawa Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).Also, it is interesting to note that, among Japanese scholars,Gyoza School adherents tend to belong to law schools or politicalscience departments, whereas Manju School followers tend to be inJapanese history or literature departments. This is not a hard­and-fast generalization, and Watanabe would seem to present anexception.

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12. See: (1) "'Michi' to 'miyabi'" ~ 'l$V" ["The Way" and"Elegance"], a long treatise on Kokugaku, in four parts, publishedin Kokka gakkai zasshi 87:9-10 (September 1974), 87:11-12 (Novem­ber 1974), 88:3-4 (March 1975), and 88:5-6 (May 1975); (2) KinseiNihon seiji shisa shi J1r -t!!t s.;$ a~~ It.~. 1!- [A .History ofEarly-Modern Japanese Political Th9ught] (Tokyo: Nihon hoseshuppan kyakai, 1985); (3) ,,' Go ika' to shacha" t~f~ fu t ~ ~t!t.["Authority" and Symbol], Shisa 740 (February 1986); and (4),,' Taihei' to 'Kekoku' I' ~-f- t. ~ 1$1 [ "Peace" and "Empire"], inKokka gakkai zasshi, ed., Kokka to shimin t.!J~ 't~ ~ [Stateand Citizens] (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1987), vol. 2. I wish to thankWatanabe for providing me with copies of all these publications.

13. This concern that a book's title correspond to its con­tent may be peculiarly Western in nature, however. Note thatMikiso Hane translated Maruyama's Nihon seiji shisa shi kenkyu(literally, "Studies in the History of Japanese PoliticalThought l

' ) as Studies in the Intellectual History of TokugawaJapan, limiting it to the period with which it actually deals.

14. A perfectionist, Watanabe refuses to publish anything inbook form that does not meet his meticulously high standards. Itshould also be noted that in Jap~n the publishing of articles inspecialized journals does not imply the same "finality" as in theNorth American scholarly world. A Japanese will pUblish anarticle partly to get feedback from colleagues in the field,somewhat as a Western scholar might circulate a word-processeddraft copy of an article to solicit comments. Though this analo­gy is admittedly overdrawn, it helps explain why so many Japanesescholarly books are in fact collections of previously publishedessays--something quite rare in North America.

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